Peter Cousins, Great Britain's under 100kg judoka, did not last long in the Olympic Games yesterday. Ten minutes, to be precise. But he nearly did not get here at all, and this is why.

One morning in 2005 he was tearing down the road from London to Harlow, in Essex, being driven by a friend in a small, limp Fiat. They were pushing the car because Cousins had told the anti-doping arm of UK Sport that if it wanted him for a random out-of-competition drugs test, his home in Harlow was where he would be. And he was not.

He was not in Harlow because he had stayed in London the night before because of training there. And he had not updated UK Sport with his change of whereabouts because the 24-hour internet café he had gone to the night before to do so was shut.

En route to Essex, Cousins's mother and brother phoned him from home to say that a doping control officer had arrived to take a urine sample. He told them to urge him to stay because he was on his way, but the officer soon left. Cousins reckons that he was so close that they probably passed each other in the car as he turned into his street.

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Simon Barnes

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The trouble is that this was Cousins's third missed test in 18 months. “I was in tears,” he said yesterday. “The most I've ever taken is a protein shake. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I go nowhere near drugs. I eat far too much Indian, but I don't know if an Indian can be considered a drug.”

He also explained why he had missed two other tests. He was “young [24] and so naive with computers”. He did not have a computer at home, so the information that he would provide on his whereabouts three months in advance was hard to update. He calls himself “scatty” and “clerically terrible”. “Now, thankfully, I've got people in place who check for me,” he said.

The way he tells it, the “whereabouts” system, whereby athletes have to give notice of where doping control officers can track them down any day in the year, was invented to catch him out. Indeed, the way he tells it, the instinctive emotion is sympathy for the indelible stain on his career, for the fact that three missed tests equals a three-month ban from judo and for the fact that he then discovered that a British Olympic Association (BOA) bylaw meant that he was ineligible to go to an Olympics.

The way he tells it, you thank the BOA's appeals panel for its wisdom in restoring his eligibility. Indeed, you wish that he had had a better time of it on the mat yesterday because he lost a frustrating bout in the first round to Levan Zhorzholiani, of Georgia, and that was that - Olympics over.

But imagine if Cousins had beaten Zhorzholiani. Or imagine if he had gone through the field and won the gold medal. Because the headlines would have been as follows: “Peter Cousins is no standard-bearer for British judo”, “Peter Cousins can't run away from his past”. Why? Because those were the sentiments commonly expressed when Christine Ohuruogu won the 400 metres gold medal in the World Championships in Osaka, Japan, last year, although if we copy and paste diligently, you can bet there would also have been a number of references to “Cousins's fairytale final”.

In Cousins's defence, we should point out that in 2005 there was no facility for athletes to text changes of their whereabouts to UK Sport and the BOA appeals panel agreed that the system had been confusing. On the other hand, you also wonder why Cousins did not leave the internet café and call the UK Sport 24-hour whereabouts phone line.

Yet Cousins is an instantly likeable man and you want to believe in him. Unfortunately, however well he tells it, we can never really know what he was doing when those testers tried to find him. Likewise Ohuruogu, and she has scores of decent character witnesses, too.

Ohuruogu starts her Olympic campaign in the 400 metres tomorrow. Tuesday then brings the women's 400 metres final plus the men's triathlon featuring Tim Don, the third of the Britons here who have missed three tests. Human nature makes you want to believe in them, too.

Newspaper headlines may always package them as heroes or villains. Their burden is that, no matter how well they tell it, we will never really know which is which.